Growing up in Paterson wasn't the easiest thing.
I had this idea for a long time to make a film about a poet in Paterson named Patterson. I wanted him to be working class. Eventually I thought a bus was a perfect visual way to move him, to drift him through the city, to have a measured kind of routine lifestyle. And all these things kind of congealed into the film "Paterson" eventually.
Floyd Paterson and other fighters, they just don't take part. They make a million dollars, they get a Rolls Royce and a nice home and a white wife and think, 'well, I made it'.
Frank Sinatra told Floyd Paterson how he should whoop me. Frank Sinatra.
I had Paterson, and The Art Lover, to guide me for The Tales of Horror (written from 1988-'97 and published in 1999), but I still was so lost, back then, as I tried to understand what I was writing and how it went together. There was a draft of that manuscript that had all these brightly colored paper clips on the pages so I could visualize what I saw as the book's themes and threads - that was a long time ago.